The German car-maker says its “optional power upgrade” is designed to give customers more choice.
Car companies are parasites. America was built on trains and the investments into car infrastructure have paralleled US declines. Its just not an effecient use of public resources to build highways between cities.
You can get a lifetime subscription now, next year ‘we have reviewed customer choices and will be discontinuing the lifetime subscription’, so they can continue to milk their customers
Just a life time subscription as this. See attachment.
TomTom did this too. You paid them a life time fee and then they decided you had to start paying an additional fee every month.
If it’s all software, that means that you can jailbreak it, just like a phone.
WTF ?
This company already has another scandal brewing, since 2005 they have been installing plastic engine parts, particularily the intake manifolds have been designed as a single use item to be replaced roughly every 3 years. Custom aluminum will run you $1000 for the part itself if you don’t want to keep swapping plastic, not to mention the ridiculous labour costs as well. Avoid!
For $1000 you could get a small furnace for cintering, a regular 3D printer and some of that special PLA that has metal powder in it that you can print and then cinter into a solid metal piece (The PLA bakes off) and just make the fucking thing yourself.
Basically every car manufacturer pulls shit like this these days; good luck avoiding all of them.
If it’s specific to a certain model, that would be good info.
That said VW obviously sucks for pulling the stunt mentioned in the article, which applies to (all?) its electric models.
Yeah, we’ve got more choice now.
I’m glad I used my freedom of choice to buy a different make.
Okay, it’s high time for some serious regulatory intervention.
This is despite a wider embrace of subscriptions in general…
I’m not sure this is the right conclusion. What seems like a “wider embrace of subscriptions” may be happening because subscriptions are becoming harder and harder to avoid. We don’t like them; they’re being forced on us. That’s an important difference.
I also think this is misusing the current statistics and drawing wrong conclusions.
Nobody is asking for these kind of subscription models.
Whag do you mean? Of course they are… everyone likes not reciving what they paid for to only have to pay a monthly charge for it… just look at what people pay monthly for… they will so enjoy this… /s
In France, people who have VW cars are not the best or brightest drivers. It could work.
UK too. The VW is the new Audi.
Thanks.
This is so distopian it sounds like a joke
The manufacturers fee for speeding is higher than the fine the police gives you.
1999: “Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization.”
lol. 1999 was the best time for humanity; ridiculous!
2025: Oh shit…
“We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.”
That’s why I live my life as if it were still the 90s…oh shit, am I in the matrix already?
And the choice given is if want your car deliberately crippled, or you want to cough up money.
German car industry has one foot in the grave. The German car industry lobbyist have successfully weakened or delayed many EU climate and sustainability initiatives. I fucking hope the German car industry collapses sooner than later and weaken Germany’s political power in the EU.
German car industry has one foot in the grave.
I wonder if that is true though. Sure, they lobby that way when they want government subsidies.
They might be late to the e-car game (but the above article applies to e-cars only anyhow).
But all that largely applies to most car industries across the globe, yet they do adapt, if slowly. Except those under totalitarian control, they adapt faster.
German car industry has one foot in the grave.
I think that all or close to it auto manufacturers have some form of subscription service now with monthly fees. It’s not something specific to German manufacturers.
randomly picks from this list of auto manufacturers
Buick.
https://www.buick.com/ownercenter/onstar/learn
OnStar One Super Cruise
for vehicles with Super Cruise
$64.99/mo.
Save up to 16% by choosing this plan
OnStar Connect Plus
-
In-Vehicle Wi-Fi® Hotspot
-
Music
-
Podcasts
-
Audiobooks
-
News
-
Video Streaming (if properly equipped)
-
Games (if properly equipped)
-
Internet Browser (if properly equipped)
Safety & Security
-
Stolen Vehicle Assistance
-
Safety Services
-
OnStar Guardian App
-
Roadside Assistance
Super Cruise
-
Hands-Free Driver Assistance Technology
-
Turn Signal Activated Lane Change
-
Automatic Lane Change (if properly equipped)
-
Hands-Free Trailering (if properly equipped)
Is that subscription for OnStar or Super Cruise? One is a service with legitimate ongoing operating costs; the other is not.
-
I have German heritage, as does my wife. I have lived in Germany. Looking at the Germany of today, I can’t wait to see its power collapse. They might (still) be the most unworthily arrogant people on the planet.
no, that would be Russians.
The future is a fucking farce.
Psych! You thought you were gonna get star trek style utopia, while we’ve been descending into fascist dystopia for several decades!?!
Woo! Techno-feudalism!
I’m still holding out hope for cyberpunk. At least it comes with skylines and cool back alley markets.
And cybernetics that won’t play adds in your brain until you have a seizure!. Seriously settings like cyberpunk and shadowrun are starting to look good by the standards of what we’re heading for. (Shadowrun is also old enough that you could actually just barely survive on a part time job without sharing an appartment even in the dystopia)
deleted by creator
The intent is to provide
playersowners with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking differentheroeshorsepower.They came for the Gamers, but I did not speak out because I was not a Gamer.
Hey, we did speak out and most of us didn’t shut up since. Fuck EA, VW, BMW, whoever tries to push microtransactions.
At this point, companies will do literally fucking anything, just to pad the numbers for the shareholder reports. The Volkswagen group can screw itself. When we start decent seeing vehicles at a decent price again, maybe we can resume this conversation. Everyone’s tired of plastic garbage for top dollar
they aren’t even good cars anyway. they’re shit.
I will never buy a vw again, that is a fact.
Skip all of those brands. Škoda too.
Škoda are a massive offender, in my eyes. No one here drives their cars, except for taxis, because they were cheap, comfortable enough, and no one cares if you beat one up. Now, they position themselves as some kind of a mid-range luxury brand, but the quality does not speak for itself whatsoever
Yet people in my extended family keep buying them. They are people who are well off, too, so they could buy something nicer. They bought a trailer home for $30,000 to use for vacationing ffs, might as well invest in a nice car so they don’t have to buy a new one every 3–5 years because it rusts to shit.
This is partially my envy talking, but still, I don’t get it. I have a nicer car and my household makes less. Makes no sense.
When we start decent seeing vehicles to a decent price again,
I don’t know about the Volkswagen ID.3, but in general, I think that car prices have tended to come down slightly over the years. I was in a conversation earlier about car prices earlier (talking about how truck prices had greatly increased).
If you go back 20 years, take a pretty plain-Jane standby, the Toyota Camry:
https://www.kbb.com/toyota/camry/2005/
2005 Toyota Camry pricing starts at $4,091 for the Camry LE Sedan 4D, which had a starting MSRP of $20,515 when new.
That’d be $33,934.10 in 2025 dollars.
A 2025 Camry has an MSRP of $28,700, about 15% lower.
Pickup trucks — which are considerably more expensive now in the US than they were a few decades back — are an exception to this, but there are other factors going on there.
EDIT: Though tariffs may wind up driving prices up.
I don’t think this factors in things that have gone up significantly, such as cost of repair and maintenance. I think another easy thing to point to would be the amount of 84 month car loans, and how many people struggle to pay those. I will also point out in 2005 that wage inflation was much closer to keeping pace with overall inflation. It’s easy to point to the one thing you did, but that misses the full picture imo.
When we start decent seeing vehicles at a decent price again
These exist, they’re just not in the USA. Look at what companies like BYD, MG, and Xiaomi are doing in practically every developed country except the USA. The entry-level BYD Dolphin EV is just under AU$30k (US$19k) in Australia, including taxes. Xiaomi have a sports car for around US$40k.
